Ben Evans (me) is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. I was born in North Carolina in 1995. I didn't really get serious about making art until I was around thirteen or fourteen; at that point, my mom started to put me into art classes and camps. I ended up going to Pratt Institute for college, which is also in Brooklyn.

Over a year ago, my previous account @beniswrong got taken down for excessive nudity in the drawings, and as a kind of tongue-and-cheek response to that, I chose the antonym of the previous name.

I think the overall pace of the city is something that just becomes second nature after you’ve lived here for a couple of years, and more than anything it helps me keep creating and drawing constantly. The art scene is unmatched, which makes seeing new work – good or bad – very accessible.

Totally. It’s really sad to see so many peers and super talented artists struggle and not get compensated for the work they make. I think it’s really important to surround yourself with people who have a common goal and to hang in circles where both parties want to build each other up and see one another thrive. Creating a support system in these circles allows everyone to benefit and live. Financially speaking, time is money, and a lot of emerging artists I know who have side jobs and such to make ends meet have to set their schedules in order to define time to work and still be able to survive.

I think the vocabulary of images I've created in my work has become its own ‘thing’ in a way that surpasses the actual action going on in the scenes. The hair and the spittle (or vomit) stand more as icons in the images; that’s referential to something outside of itself. The illustrations are very static even though there is stuff happening. I think iconography to this current body of work is essential in order to make sense of the world these figures exist within.

Detailed hair on animated characters is pretty comical to me on a very superficial level. But I am very conscious of gender and the departure from gender norms in my work. I wouldn't label any of the figures as male or female. I think a lot of people see the hair as political and feminist when they look at the work, and I really like that there’s a definite undertone of progressive gender politics that reveals itself.

I spent a lot of time alone when I was growing up and I was home-schooled for one year, which is strangely something that’s constantly on my mind. As odd as it may sound, spending a lot of my developmental years secluded and in solitude made me really conscious of people’s deep connection with the spaces they exist in– bedrooms, bathrooms, etc. I usually begin the drawing with the room and then work with the figures.

Totally. I think the repetitive nature of tiles really makes the illustrations stranger and more surreal, especially tiled bedrooms – which is a strange concept in itself.

I completely want to normalise the situations at hand in the works. I’m an extremely sarcastic person in my everyday life and I think that these are total extensions of my own dark humour put onto paper. I think that drawing attention to these very specific and particular settings allows each individual to view them in a totally new light.

Hungry?

I think that the usage of weed and fetish gear in the works is more a statement of independence and freedom than anything else. I’m sure a lot of people think I am just making ‘stoner art’ but I’m really using it as a catalyst to make them more sarcastic and darkly comical.

Great!

I look at bad graphic design a lot, especially the way colour is dealt with in such an arbitrary way. It feels really contemporary and much more interesting that objectively ‘good’ graphic design. I try and explore colour theory in a semi-arbitrary way when I make works similarly.

Why does your six-year-old have an iPhone X?

Instagram is a game-changer for artists in our generation and I have met some amazing people through it. I think a lot of times people are afraid of putting themselves really out there online but there is only space to gain.

I think it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I totally agree that it’s great that everyone has access to work that is not influenced by old-school curators who are putting opinions into your head on what is good and what is not. On the other hand, I feel like now that there is so much content it’s hard to see through a lot of the bullshit and get to the good stuff. I think it definitely helps people to understand new emerging artists because a lot of times they will post progress pictures, or photos of their studios and work practice, which is always an eye-opening experience.

I think graphic figurative art gets a bad reputation a lot of the time and is difficult to be taken seriously; to me, these three guys – especially Tom Wesselmann and Peter Saul – deal with subject matter and execution in a very interesting and ‘serious’ manner. I’m always really hesitant to collaborations because the end product is always really up in the air; however, I look up to countless artists on a daily basis.

I’ve been really interested in animation for a while. I’m very particular about aesthetics in the drawings and sometimes that has been an issue when moving it over to an animation. But I’d love to work on it in the future, or even have a TV show of my figures.

Maybe.